The idea that
the state is a form of organised lawlessness is a recurrent theme in
liberal thought. It underlies the many attempts to civilise or tame
what Hobbes aptly called the “Leviathan.” The aim is to
institutionalise constitutional checks and balances that mimic the
principles and well-tested practices of law. In other words, the
liberal idea implies that, at least in times of peace, the state should
be controlled according to law. In many ways, this constitutional
approach was very successful. The implementation of constitutionalist
strategies significantly altered the aspect and behaviour of the state.
Nevertheless, constitutionalism was more effective as a source of
legitimacy than as a check on the powers of the state. Liberals all too
easily acquiesced in the state’s claim to represent or embody the law,
in its usurpation and monopolisation of legislative, judicial and
executive powers. In the end, few people were able to understand that
law should be seen as the restraining condition of legislation rather
than as its product. The state, the institutionalised form of
(preparedness for) lawless war, came to be regarded as a necessary
institution of lawful peace.

To the extent
that liberals subscribed to this view—and they did so en masse—they
conceded the main point of political ontology to the apologists of
statism: that war, not peace, is the normal or natural condition of
human life. This is perhaps the most basic axiom of statism. It
implies that there can be peace only inside an organisation designed to
fight and win wars. It implies that there is no natural society, no
“spontaneous order” (as Hayek would say). Man plus man equals war. The
whole of the statist philosophy is contained in that simple statement.

Liberals may
have tried to convince themselves of the lawful character of the state,
statists have always denied that there is such a thing as an open
inclusive society. Society, for them, is not integrated by lawful
action, but by organisation and command (whether lawful or not). Thus,
to the statist, the idea of civilising the Leviathan is incongruous with
its very nature: the Leviathan is the source and mainstay of
civilisation; to shackle him19
is to condemn the world to everlasting war and chaotic confusion.

Statism is an
ideology, a theory of humanity as bent on self-destruction. According
to this theory, personal morality is not a value at all, but a curse.
Modern statism was launched from a platform of profound scepticism. Its
philosophical premises were that there is no reason for believing what
we believe, no matter with how much conviction, and no reason for
believing that what we want or desire, no matter how passionately and
sincerely, will do us any good. Consequently the belief that by acting
on one’s own judgement one does what is right, must be groundless. The
individual human person is a source of error; human interaction is error
raised to a power that equals the number of those involved in the
interaction. The first requirement of wisdom, then, is that we do not
act on the basis of our own beliefs and passions.

B.
Hobbes: the Moral Alchemy of Absolute Power

Hobbes,
arguably the most daring architect of modem statism, translated the
sceptical position into a “science of politics.” He did so by equating
a condition in which every man acts on his own judgement—what he called
“the natural condition of mankind”—with a universal war of all against
all in which life is nasty, brutish and short. This allowed him to
define peace among many as a condition in which one judgement directs
the actions of all of them. For Hobbes, this one judgement had to be
the judgement of one (whether one man, or one body of men acting in
concert). Once we grant the initial equation we can no longer deny the
need for an absolute monarchy. It emerges as a mathematical truth from
its axiomatic base. Thus, although acting on our own judgement is our
“right by nature,” it cannot be right in any moral sense, because it
stands in the way of our getting what we want, hence of what is “good.”
Reason cannot but conclude that it is better that we all renounce our
natural right to act by the light of our own judgement and submit to the
judgement of a single authority, a single ruler or sovereign agent.
However, submission to a single authority does not change our nature,
and so war always looms just around the corner. It is, then, a
requirement of lasting peace that the sovereign take every precaution to
prevent people from acting on their own judgement, from following their
own conscience or living according to a personal morality.20
A state can succeed in its pacifying mission only by keeping the scope
for personal morality as small as possible.

Hobbes did not
pluck his political theory out of thin air. He drew inspiration from a
great tradition of humanist scepticism, associated in his age primarily
with such figures as Montaigne and Justus Lipsius.21
Its
roots were the epistemological skepsis of the Greek and
Hellenistic schools of Antiquity, and the stoic insistence that
happiness requires detachment from the passions and affections. The
dissociation of action and judgement encouraged a retreat to “the inner
citadel,” where one could indulge in games of the intellect and the
passions without assuming any real responsibility.22
The inner citadel might be in the mind only, in the enclosed space of
one’s home, or it might be a blessed circle of intellectual or artistic
friends. In any case it offered the occasion for enjoying liberty, but
at the price of renouncing all claims to independent action in the
public world or, what amounts to the same thing: at the price of
accepting, and siding with, whatever power ruled the world outside. The
ancient Stoics had already discovered how easy it is to claim a
quasi-divine omnipotence for the wise man: having rejected the light of
his own merely subjective reason as well as the motive force of his
affections, he accepts, indeed wants, what is necessary and inevitable,
and so, by an impeccable logic, it follows that everything happens
according to his will. In this he is, as far as any mortal can be, the
equal of Zeus, the ruler of the universe: free, even if his social
status is that of a slave, rich, even if without a dime, and completely
happy. In a like manner, Hobbes taught his contemporaries to accept and
side with the powers that be, and to resolve to make every action a
ruler might undertake their own. Think of the ruler as your agent, a
mere actor; think of yourself as the author of all he does; and you’ll
find that you have no injustice to fear from his strength, only from his
weakness. Whatever he does to you, you do to yourself: and what you do
to yourself cannot be unjust. But when his enemies get you, you suffer
injustice: they are not your agents.

This Stoic
formula stands as a triumph of moral alchemy: it holds the promise of
turning a lowly creature into a god, a poor man into a tycoon, a slave
into a master, a subject into a sovereign legislator. However, its
application to worldly politics was contestable. Pascal stated the
problem clearly in one of his Pensées: “Unable to fortify
justice, people have justified force.” It was inevitable that the
Hobbesian application of the Stoic formula should be seen as proof that
the state is without virtue, an amalgam of force, intimidation and
cowardice, with no redeeming value, except, perhaps, that it permits
people to go about their private business (to the extent that the rulers
allow them to do so) as long as they turn a blind eye to what the rulers
do to others.

Hobbes’ theory
has continued to enjoy considerable prestige in academic circles. There
is good reason for this: modern statism owes a lot to Hobbes, because in
the course of adapting the Stoic formula to the phenomenon of political
rule he laid the foundation of the modern conception of citizenship.
Citizenship, at least since the days of Aristotle, refers to the
problem of reconciling freedom and political rule. Aristotle’s proposal
for solving this problem had been rather simplistic: free men will take
turns at ruling and being ruled, so that in the long run the equality of
the free is preserved. According to the modern conception, “the
citizen” also refers indiscriminately to the ruler and the ruled, but in
a stronger sense. It seeks to identify the rulers with the
ruled, and so to rid the concept of rule of all traces of subordination
and oppression. The Hobbesian “social contract” indicates the way to
realise this ambition: the ruler commands the ruled, but the ruled
authorise the ruler, and therefore indirectly rule themselves.
According to this conception, the state is the medium through which
people rule themselves. To this day, the thesis of collective
self-government remains the general form of “the legitimacy of the
state.” In Hobbes’ theory, however, the form had been all too
transparent; at every point the contours of naked power were visible
beneath the legal veneer of a common principal-agent relationship.

C.
Plato: State and Civil Service

To infuse the
state with substantial, as against merely formal, legitimacy, modem
statism could appeal to another venerable tradition of political
thought. Its fountainhead was Plato, and again the philosophical base
was an extreme form of scepticism. Although Plato made extraordinary
claims about the power of philosophy to pierce the veil of ignorance and
error and to arrive at certain truth, he was equally insistent that the
vast majority of people were condemned to remain forever captive in a
morass of fleeting illusions and irrational impulses. That there was
any certifiable truth in mere opinion was as unacceptable to Plato as
the sceptical sophists’ claim that the grand theories of the
philosophers were also mere opinions. He did not share the sophists’
scepticism concerning philosophy, but his scepticism concerning the
theoretical and practical knowledge of ordinary people was if anything
more radical than theirs. After all, the sophists made it clear that
the lack of epistemological certainty and unshakeable moral foundations
does not prevent people from finding viable solutions to the problems of
the day, day after day. For Plato, on the other hand, these “solutions”
are likely to be accumulations of mere folly. They are part of the
problem, if not its main cause: ad hoc responses to unanalysed
difficulties, they provide no fixed rule or measure of action;
uninformed by reason, they can only be irrational; and irrational social
practices breed irrational human beings. Unless we can organise human
life on fixed and true foundations, irrationality will continue to grow
like a cancer and engulf everybody in a hopeless war of all against all.23
Plato’s scepticism, as a reflection on the deplorable morass of
ignorance and folly in which most individuals are stuck, serves to
vindicate his claim that war is the natural condition of mankind.

It is not
surprising, then, that Plato’s political theory, like Hobbes,” ends up
endorsing monarchy as the only true solution of the human predicament.
Plato finds nothing to commend in the idea of a personal morality that
is not formed and selected by the state. Long before Hobbes presented
his ideal monarchy as one in which “all movement proceeds from the
Sovereign,” Plato rhapsodised about perfect unity under the supreme
authority of a Philosopher-King or a Nocturnal Council.24
The main distinction with Hobbes is that the Platonic ruler supposedly
derives his title to rule from his eminent knowledge or wisdom, whereas
the Hobbesian sovereign derives it from his eminent power (or rather:
from his subjects’ wisdom in resigning themselves to it).

In some ways
Plato was a far more astute political thinker than Hobbes, who tended to
assume that absolute power was an original gift to the sovereign. The
sovereign might subsequently squander it by his foolishness, but how he
got it in the first place was not, for Hobbes, a political problem at
all. Hobbes was well aware that in a large “commonwealth” there would
always be any number of rival centres of power: popular men, large
cities, corporations, churches, universities, independent judges, fiscal
officers, monopolists. These, Hobbes insisted, the sovereign would have
to keep under tight control, lest they destroy the unity of rule that is
the essence of a commonwealth. However, he had very little to say about
how the sovereign could make and keep his power absolute. Given Hobbes’
naturalistic approach to human interaction, the only plausible method
would appear to be the time-honoured practice of making and breaking
alliances (divide et impera). However, Hobbes could not admit
this method, because it presupposes that the sovereign’s power is far
from absolute, that it depends on the support of others, and is
therefore conditional on its being used to their advantage and in
accordance with their wishes. The Hobbesian sovereign, it seems, has to
buy support: he must be a power-broker, skilled in the art of
wheeling-and-dealing. There is no way in which he can stop his
potential rivals and powerful subjects from acting on their own
judgement in trying to get the most out of a given situation. This
rules out that “all movement proceeds from the sovereign.” When the
sovereign is no more than a conduit through which particular interests
or personal moralities assert themselves, the fiction that what the
sovereign does to a subject is never unjust is destroyed.

Plato on the
other hand, met the problem of absolute power head-on. He had to: his
ruler was to be a philosopher, almost by definition a powerless, lonely
figure, with no popular support, no inclination for swift and decisive
action, no guts for a ruthless pre-emptive strike. Moreover, as the
champion of “principle,” the philosopher is totally averse to
wheeling-and-dealing, to becoming a leader by jumping on every passing
band-wagon. A philosopher can be king only by force of the
non-mercenary loyalty of his subjects. The key to a well-ordered
society, for Plato, is the construction of an absolute
power-base, the breeding, through eugenic manipulation, education
and training, of a new kind of men, unconditionally loyal to their
ruler, devoid of any inclination to act on their own judgement, to hold
beliefs of their own or to be moved by personal passions and affections.
They, the guardians of the city, the prototypes of what we now call
civil servants, have no individual personality, hence no use for a
personal morality. The price of having a state is the renunciation of
humanity on the part of its members. Man and state don’t mix. This is
a direct implication of the axiom that war is the natural condition of
mankind. Because Hobbes failed, or refused, to draw this implication,
his theory of the state remained incomplete and ultimately incoherent.
On the other hand, Plato’s theory gave us the notion of the civil
servant, but not that of the citizen. His guardians of the city and
their helpers were merely servants of the ruler; they served him, and
only because he aimed his policies at the common good, did they also
serve the general interest of the rest of the population. The farmers,
traders, and workers are no more than subjects; they are not in any
meaningful sense members of the state.

D.
Rousseau: State and Citizen

It was
Jean-Jacques Rousseau who pointed the way to a modern synthesis of
statism. It consisted of an infusion of Platonic substance into the
Hobbesian form. The synthesis proceeded by a radicalisation of both
elements. Rousseau’s “social contract” required an unconditional
surrender sans réserve of each, with all his rights, to all,
because otherwise there can be no perfect union or unity. The contract
transfers all rights to the collective person of the Community or
State or People. This collective person is not a pre-existing entity;
it is formally created in and by the contract itself. It is one person,
but a fictitious one. Therefore it is nonsense, or a mistake of
categories, to apply the logic of human interaction, of plurality,
diversity, scarcity, to the relations that constitute the state. They
are relations between a whole and itself, a whole and its parts, or
between parts of the same whole. Moreover, because the whole, as it is
constituted by the original contract, is completely undifferentiated,
there is a perfect correspondence between the whole and each of its
parts. Therein lies its perfect unity. Of course, this unity refers
only to the whole constituted by the contract, i.e., to the rights of
many combined into the rights of one. The unity of the state is a legal
fiction. In physical terms there is no unity: the contract does not
change the natural facts of human existence, in particular: the
separateness of persons. That is why it is nonsensical to think, as
Hobbes apparently did, that natural human beings can make up a state.
On the contrary, the social contract signifies the total and radical
renunciation of all claims based on one’s individual human nature. In
the state no individual as such has any right whatsoever. Only the
state has rights; and because the state is by definition a perfect
unity, each and every part of the state has the same right as the whole.
Only as a citizen does a person have the same rights as the state
itself, but these rights are not his in any proprietary sense: they
belong to the whole, and to him only because he is a part of the whole;
he can claim them only in so far as he identifies with his role as a
citizen. This highly theoretical and abstract construction has but one
rationale: to provide a formal solution to the problem of reconciling
freedom and rule. That solution is collective self-rule, realised when
a People rules itself.

However, a
formal solution is not a political solution. In real (as against merely
logical) terms, the social contract has no causal impact. It does not
make a People out of a mass of men. It does not turn a man (a
separate, independent physical being) into a citizen (a fictional
person with no independent existence or motive force, defined as a part
of an as yet unrealised whole). Men continue to be independently
active, fallible, passionate creatures, each with an overriding interest
in his own preservation and advancement. Each man has his own
particular individual “will.” A citizen, on the other hand, is by
definition congruent with the state as a whole; therefore he has no
other interest than the interest of the whole of which he is a part.
Consequently, all citizens have, again by definition, the same general
will. That they have this will is not a psychological fact, but a
logical implication of their being citizens.

Regardless of
the consistency and adequacy of the formal solution, the political
problem remains: how to make a People, how to transform man into
citizen? In his attempt to answer this question, Rousseau resurrected
Plato’s guardians of the city, again in a far more radical form.
Rousseau “democratised” the guardians by insisting 1) that their
loyalty was to be to the public interest rather than to the
philosopher-king (or, equivalently, that they should be moved only by
the General Will), 2) that all persons in the state, and not just those
in its governmental apparatus, should conform to the requirements of
civil service (so that civil service would be the characteristic
business of every citizen), and 3) that the philosopher-king (Rousseau’s
législateur) should be placed outside the power-structure of the
state, where he may enjoy an exalted, quasi-divine “moral authority,”
but no “political power” whatsoever. The latter requirement must ensure
that the People retain the legislative power, i.e., the power to give
formal legal force to the rules proposed by the wise legislator. These
emendations of Plato’s theory serve to make it fit the formal
requirement of collective self-government. They annihilate its
hierarchical class-structure, yet retain its central insight: that in
order to make the state work, it is necessary to transform human nature
through skilful indoctrination (education, myth, religion) and training.
The success of the political project depends, then, on “the secret
work” of the législateur: on his ability to get people, without
their knowing it, and if necessary against their will, to change their
mode of existence. If successful, the outcome of this project will be
that people are citizens, living according to the laws
(expressions of the General Will), freed from the need to survive on the
strength of their own personal judgements.

The one
drawback of Rousseau’s theory, from a statist point a view, was that it
ruled out an optimistic assessment of the chances for a successful
conclusion of the political project. Everything in it turns on the
presence of a succession of wise législateurs. Rousseau liked to
say that the whole of human history had not produced more than ten such
men. All of their great constitutions had perished after a relatively
short time, even though they had worked under far more propitious
circumstances than one could hope for in the present day and age. It
was as if Rousseau wished to stress that the legitimate state is,
indeed, a theoretical, but by no means a practical possibility. During
the nineteenth century, some schools attempted to by-pass the contingent
element of the legislateur, and to present the coming of a
legitimate state as a sort of historical necessity (philosophy or
dialectics of history, e.g. in Hegelian or Marxian form).

E.
Marx: the Citizen as the New Man

Marx arguably
pushed the concepts of the state and of citizenship to their outermost
limits. From Plato to Rousseau the state was viewed primarily, if not
exclusively in military and political terms. Plato’s guardians
assisted the ruler in war and peace, but there is little indication that
Plato intended them to “run to economy,” except perhaps in times of war.
He made it perfectly clear that the economy (or natural society, what
he called: the elementary state) has no need for guardians. In his
logical reconstruction of the state, the phase of the elementary state
covers the whole spectrum from a simple subsistence economy involving a
very small number of people (five or six) to a global market economy
with a highly developed division and specialisation of labour, extensive
trade and sophisticated financial and monetary arrangements. The
guardians appear on the scene only when the desire for luxury begins to
seek satisfaction through robbery and war. However, the guardians do
not displace the natural men that inhabit the elementary state; the
state of the guardians sits on top of the natural society. Under the
rule of the guardians, the ordinary people continue to live as they
always had and always will. The Platonic state divides society in a
political class and an economic class. The main concern of political
theory is the transformation of predatory warriors into socially useful
guardians. Rousseau’s state obviously could not have this hierarchical
class-structure. Nevertheless, Rousseau presupposed a distinction
between economic and political activities. Like Plato’s, his theory was
concerned with the use of political means (violence, force, coercion),
not with economic means (labour and exchange). Consequently, his
concept of the citizen applied to men only in so far as they participate
in political activity. The economy as such, i.e., the modus vivendi
through which people seek to satisfy their needs and to reach their
goals without political means, takes care of itself: when politics is
under control, economics is no problem. With respect to the economic
dimension of life, men could continue to live according to their own
nature: there was no need to transform them into citizens. This
dualistic view soon became a sort of orthodoxy, enshrined, in France, in
the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen. Each person
is at once a human being (holder of natural rights) and a citizen
(a member of a state, holder of political rights). Marx stood
this classical time-honoured view on its head. According to the Marxian
analysis, when the economy is under control, politics ceases to be a
problem. Marx differentiated actions by the end they aimed at, not by
the means they employed. In his “scientific” view, every end justifies
the means necessary or useful to its attainment. Because apportioning
means to end is an economic function, every means is economic. Thus, he
could represent slavery and robbery and the state as economic forms and
practices. The political is a subset of the economic.25
For him, political emancipation was only a half-way house. Its
principles of citizenship were basically correct, but it was a mistake
to apply them only to those economic functions traditional usage
identifies as political. One should extend them across the board to all
social activities. The idea that “particular” man and state don’t mix
was no more than a half-truth. The full truth, for Marx, was that
“particular” man and society don’t mix. Consequently, one should
jettison the natural rights of men, as they are no more than licences to
disregard the common good. Citizenship, on the other hand, signified
the concrete realisation of community; but the community would not be
perfect unless it found expression in every social activity—in one’s
daily work no less than in one’s occasional political roles as a voter,
representative or civil servant.26
If there was any place in a well-ordered society for the autonomous
individual, it would have to be outside the vital circuits of social
organisation, during moments of leisure, in games and plays.27